Tag Archives: ice cream

I didn’t make it up to Maine this summer. Maybe that means summer didn’t happen, because Maine is the state of summer for New Englanders. It’s the capital of summer for those who’ve grown tired of The Cape, a reward for those who can will themselves to drive past that scary and confusing state called New Hampshire. It’s a place where the clearness of the water makes up for its frigid temps. For out-of-towners like me, it seems to exist only for vacation (it’s called Vacationland, after all); it’s a place to go, not a place to stay—weekend Xanax, essentially. Maine has all the chill.

Besides “chill,” when I think about Maine, I think about my mom, not because she’s chill—I’m a product of a chill-less family—but because I spent many summer days there when I was a child, with just her. She worked weekends and nights and so I had a gift many other kids didn’t (or, they did, because we were misplaced shit-eaters in a town where no one seemed to have to work): a summer vacation adventure partner. Tuesdays were usually our big day, and we wouldn’t make it past Ogunquit—a day is only so long—but we had the best time driving with the windows open, baking and snoring on the beach, absolutely ruling at paddle ball, and eating cliché Maine blueberry confections, most frequently a slice of blueberry pie at The Goldenrod in York. That’s why cool vanilla ice cream melting into a dark purple sea of molten blueberries is my madeleine, and my favorite taste of summer.

I stared at her as she stood in the locker room and moved her hands slowly up and down her perfectly flat, milky-white abdomen from under her black camisole. The top’s low back showed off strong back muscles and its spaghetti straps sat snuggly on pulled-back shoulders that extended into skinny, lean arms. Tight, flared, floor-length spandex covered endless legs. She had finished working out, but you wouldn’t know. There was no rose to her cheeks or shine to her skin, and her blonde pixie cut—soft not blunt—sat untossled on her head, framing her heart-shaped face with perfect waves. She’s a dancer. I don’t know her beyond the blonde and the pale and the black. But I know her.

I know her because I was her. Well, a brunette her. Though likely six to seven years my senior, she is my younger self before illness, fatigue, and injury diminished the place of the art and the sport in my life, aged my limbs and heart, bloated my face. I’m not sure if the trance she put me in was heartbreaking or uplifting. I’m still the bendy-twisty creature with decent balance and an ear for a beat. But I can no longer call myself a dancer—I’m just one who dances. Dancer Lady’s too old to be in a company. She may be a teacher. I don’t know. But she’s a studio rat of some kind. She scurries to the gym on her rare days off to crosstrain, to maintain her strength and stamina. She straddles the equipment with such grace, staring dead-faced ahead and never tiring.Continue reading →

Maggie’s Ice Cream is a quaint-looking but always-hopping ice cream shop on the main strip in downtown Hyannis, Cape Cod. Well, it was. It was briefly named Laura’s and has been called Katie’s since 2002. But it will always be Maggie’s to me; no after-dinner stroll on a Cape weekend was complete without a scoop or cone from the house-like shop, with its white tables and expansive front porch. Maggie’s probably didn’t have the best ice cream, but it was homemade and satisfying after a day full of sand and sun. [ed note: Massachusetts, and specifically Boston and The Cape, is known as the unofficial ice cream capital of the US. How lucky am I?] The young teens, who at the time, seemed like adults, were always kind and patient, even though I rarely made a decision by the time it was my turn to order.

My dad was easy, and he’d rarely step foot into the shop: He always got pistachio, a departure from the coffee or mocha flavors he ordered everywhere else. It was “real” pistachio—dubbed that only because it wasn’t radioactive green, but, instead, a milky beige. I thought pistachio seemed so adult and sophisticated, European even, so I happily stole bites from my dad’s cup. I was a mini elitist: I knew never to touch green pistachio ice cream. My parents taught me the important stuff.

How can a world so white seem so dark? This isn’t the first time I’ve asked this kind of question in this space. But walking through endless walls of winter white so tall I can’t see beyond them has gotten old and contempt, depression, and illness is brewing in our apocalyptic (no longer hyperbole) city. Weak. Tired. Done.

We have limited means of transportation. We’ve suffered through arctic blasts of ice-cold air. There’s nowhere left to move the white. We just continue to pile, hoping the sky is as far away as it seems.

I swear that the fall months were warmer when I was a kid. I remember wearing jean shorts and a light sweatshirt each year on my annual trip to the Brookfield Orchards with my mom. The orchard was a 45-minute drive from our house. We had orchards just a couple of towns over that we frequented, but driving a ways to get to one felt like an adventure. We’d navigate through orange, red, and yellow tree-lined back roads, our car engulfed by the fiery hue so that nothing green or grey was visible. We were probably singing in unison along to the Top 10, my soprano an octave above her alto.

I’m having a bit of a hard time letting go of chocolate this year. Every year, around this time (well, actually a bit sooner), I post a recipe with chocolate to get it out of my system as, with the change in seasons, my days turn from brown to color.

I really turned into a lush. I found myself craving warm, fudgy-crumbed brownies, irresponsibly sliced into while they’re just baked and still gooey; the darkest and densest of flourless chocolate cakes, so overwhelming that it needs to be sliced into pencil-thin slivers; and rich ganaches coating just about everything.

When I was about 8 months old, my mom innocently gave me a lick off her spoon of vanilla soft-serve. That was my first taste of ice cream. My then-blue eyes widened, my dimples poked through very chubby cheeks, and my little tongue, reportedly, flapped furiously for more—that was my way of communicating that “Hey, I like that. Can I have some more, Mommy?” With that lick of swirled, most likely artificially flavored confection, my mom had created the monster that I am today: a fine ice cream seeker, maker, junkie.

I’m not sure why so many pastry people seem to love—and I mean love ice cream. While I get lots of pleasure out of making my own ice cream, the process isn’t as beautifully tangible as working a dough is. Pastry works my mind, pastry is my crutch when I’m feeling off but, more often than not, what I crave is ice cream. I’d take a good scoop over cake, and if only allowed to eat one sweet for the rest of my life, I might even choose ice cream over my beloved pie. I crush on ice cream so hard, that I’ll eat it in abundance deep into a second “polar vortex.” In fact, while I may go out for ice cream more often in the summer, I make more of it in the winter when berries and stone fruit, which sometimes take on an unpleasant texture in frozen desserts, are off my radar. Ice on ice. There’s just as much warmness to ice cream as there is coldness: Sometimes you patiently infuse warm milk and cream with fragrant flavors and a burst of steam kisses your face when you open the pot’s lid. You dip a spoon into it and taste to see if it’s on point. You reheat and pour this steamy mixture, carefully and slowly, into egg yolks while whisking like mad. Then you pour all of this back into the pot, and you stand, whisking still, over this gradually thickening, hot pot of custard. Dribbles of custard inevitably trail down the side of the pot or the bowl to which you’re transferring this liquid gold and you wipe them up with your finger and lick off the warm mixture—that tiny drop contains so much flavor. No, ice cream isn’t just cold.

I love how chocolate swirls find their way to the corners of your mouth, how the lips become coated by an opalescent milky film, how a dot of cream adorns the tip of your nose if you’re licking off a double-scoop cone. I love how something can at once be childlike and sophisticated, no matter what herbs or alcohols your ice cream is infused with.

I see him everyday. He’s a constant that I appreciate. He’s stoic, not showing much outward feeling of pleasure or pain. He brightens my mornings, my evenings, and my weekends. I don’t know the mystery man’s name. To me he is just Mr. 66.

I have long had a fascination with commuters—my nameless companions and the strangers. My feet usually do the work in the mornings, but sometimes I take the bus. The 66 bus. The bus so infamous that it has it’s own fake twitter account. There are familiar visages in sight every morning. The sitting old, sour-faced woman whose nose scrunches up every time a young person’s backpack accidentally graces her face on the sardine-can of a morning commute. The young mother with the rhinestone-studded, electic blue iPhone case and her super stylin’ little boy, a 2-year-old Lebron James fan. There’s the guy who looks strikingly like someone I went to high school with and who is always biting off a cream cheese–filled plain bagel from Kupel’s. I know their stops, and they probably know mine.

The first day of Spring, as I mentioned, is the first day of Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Though it has come and gone along with the important thirteenth day, nothing has changed since last year. I still make it a point to go visit my moonstruck friend and master baker, Mohammad (aka Agha Tabrizi) to pick up the plumpest, juiciest dates; some sumac-spiced mixed nuts, legumes, and seeds; and the famous cookies and sweets.

Before making the annual trip, I had decided that this was the year I was going to take the word “Americanized” out of the title of my version of an Iranian ice cream called Bastani Akbar Mashti. This saffron-flavored ice cream makes up for what it lacks in French-style creaminess in its uniquely Middle Eastern texture. The ice cream is chewy. Not chewy like the densest of premium ice creams in the US, but chewy like a melting taffy. It is traditionally served between two thin wafer cookies. When you bite into the ice cream sandwich of sorts, the ice cream shows a bit of resistance, gently teasing you until it finally touches your tongue. It’s the sweetest of battles and isn’t nearly as grueling as the one between mouth and Turkish dondurma (an even chewier, stretchier ice cream that can be cut with a knife – check it out!)

The unique chew comes from an equally unique ingredient: salaab (or salep or sahlab or salepi depending on the language). Salaab is a special polysaccharide from the tubers of a species of wild orchid. Because it has thickening powers, it’s compared to cornstarch. But cornstarch it is not. It’s the steroidal version of cornstarch. And after it has thickened something, it leaves a fragrant something-something in its wake. Sweet and floral it doesn’t shout its presence and provides a sexy aroma not a starchy blandness. Without salaab—even with cornstarch as a substitute—Bastani Akbar Mashti is just saffron, pistachio, and rose ice cream, which is still very good, of course. But not as unique.

But with salaab, the stretchy treat is borderline illegal. You see, white, powdery, fragrant salaab is a hallucinogenic substance.

Tuesday, New Year’s Day, I plucked the last beaded decoration off my Christmas tree, wishing I could keep it there just one more week, maybe two. Lights were unstrung, the tree went away, and the living room was restored to its normal twinkle-less state. Although I hadn’t slowed down and realized it was actually the holiday season until about a week before Christmas day, I found myself wishing the light would never leave. I’m not a Christmas fanatic. You know the type. That’s not me. But with the tree take-down, I felt myself wishing I were. I felt like I did as a kid going back to school after the December break. Christmas fanatic or not, the holiday is, for me, that little something to look forward to. Because after that, it is winter. Not winter-solstice-technical winter, but the winter you can feel, from skin to bone.